Research Interests

Paul A. Cimbala received his A.B. from St. Joseph's College (now University) in Philadelphia and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Emory University, where he studied under Dan T. Carter. Prior to his arrival at Fordham University in 1987, he held an editorial appointment with the Black Abolitionist Papers Project at Florida State University and taught at the University of South Carolina at Aiken. His research focus is the era of the American Civil War.

Dr. Cimbala is the author of Under the Guardianship of the Nation: The Freedmen’s Bureau and the Reconstruction of Georgia, 1865-1870 (1997, 2003), which received the Malcolm and Muriel Barrow Bell Award of the Georgia Historical Society, and The Freedmen’s Bureau: Reconstructing the American South after the Civil War (2005). He is also co-editor of seven essay collections including An Uncommon Time: The Civil War and the Northern Home Front (2002), Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front: Wartime Experiences, Postwar Adjustments (2002), and Making a New South: Race, Leadership, and Community after the Civil War (2007). He most recently published American Soldiers’ Lives: The Civil War (2008), a popular treatment of the experiences of Confederate and Union soldiers.

Dr. Cimbala participated in the editing of a volume of original documents in The Black Abolitionist Papers series dealing with African Americans and anti-slavery in Canada (1986) and has published articles, book chapters, and essays on slavery, Civil War soldiers, the northern home front, and the Freedmen’s Bureau, one of which received the Alex W. Bealer Award of the Atlanta Historical Society. He recently completed co-editing Reconstruction: America’s Continuing Civil War, which explores the continuity of wartime issues in the postwar era, and in the future expects to develop his research interests in political, social and economic adjustment of the northern states during the Civil War and Reconstruction years. He is now at work on a monograph titled Soldiering on the Home Front: The United States Army’s Veteran Reserve Corps during the Civil War and Reconstruction, co-authoring another book titled The Northern Home Front and America’s Civil War, and beginning research for Veterans North and South: The Post-Combat Experience of Civil War Soldiers. He also continues to explore the Freedmen’s Bureau’s role in post-war adjustment with research on the agency’s work in securing pensions and bounties for black Union soldiers. Since 1995, Dr. Cimbala has edited two book series for Fordham University Press: The North’s Civil War and Reconstructing America.